[pypy-dev] features, benefits, and recruiting help

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Thu, 15 Sep 2005 13:36:41 EDT, Michal Wallace writes:
>"Flexible" doesn't mean anything to me. Python is 
>already flexible, so what does that mean? Well, you've
>got these different backends. Maybe that's what it 
>means. And the people who made stackless and psyco
>and green threads are on the team, so maybe it's 
>about those things. Who knows? The site doesn't say
>so if we want to figure out the status of those 
>things, we have to think about it.

>From our point of view, Python is not flexible.  You are stuck with
some 'reasonable compromises' at the language-implementor's-decision
level.  If you have tons of memory, the best algorithms to use are
different from those that you use if you are an embedded system and
have none, and neither of those are about right for a typical
laptop.  A truly flexible system would let you code up your own
'search the dictionary' algorithm and stick it right inside the
language where it belongs, and see whether things work faster.

It is interesting -- the challenge for PyPy does not really seem to
be 'to get faster than CPython'.  Instead, it is 'to get almost as
fast as CPython.'  Once PyPy is fast enough to use commercially,
everybody who has an idea for a faster implementation of library
function X, given data that looks like Y, will be free to code it up
into its own objectspace and see what happens.  And there are a lot
of cool algorithms out there.

The problem will be getting reasonable performance at all.  There is
overhead associated with having this much flexibility.  

Laura